Travels with Herodotus (12 page)

Only Cyrus enjoys all possible comforts along this road of suffering.
Now, the Great King goes on his military expeditions well equipped with food and livestock from home, and he also brings water from the River Choäspes (on whose banks the city of Susa is situated), because water from no other river except the Choäspes is allowed to pass the king’s lips. This Choäspes water is boiled, and wherever the king might be campaigning on any given occasion, he is accompanied by a large number of four-wheeled wagons, drawn by mules, which carry the water in silver containers
.

I am fascinated by this water. Water that has been boiled ahead of time. Stored in silver vessels to keep it cool. One has to cross the desert freighted with those vessels.

We know that the water is transported on numerous four-wheeled wagons drawn by mules. What connection between the water wagons and the soldiers dropping of thirst along the way? There is none: the soldiers die, and the wagons keep rolling. They do not stop, because the water they carry is not for the soldiers; it is water that has been boiled expressly for Cyrus. The king, after all, drinks no other, so if it ran out, he would die of thirst. How could one even contemplate such an eventuality? Another thing interests me as well. There are de facto two kings
in this procession—the great, reigning Cyrus and the dethroned Croesus, who only yesterday just barely escaped death on a burning pyre, a fate that the first king had been preparing for him. What are relations between them like now? Herodotus maintains that they are cordial. But he did not take part in this expedition—he wasn’t even born yet. Do Cyrus and Croesus ride in the same equipage, no doubt adorned with gold-plated wheels, gold-plated stanchions, and a gold-plated shaft? Does Croesus sigh wistfully at the sight? Do the two gentlemen converse? If they do, it must be through an interpreter, because they share no language. And what is there to talk about, anyway? They ride thus for days, then weeks; sooner or later, they will have exhausted all possible subjects of conversation. And what if, moreover, one of them—or both—is the quiet sort, with a secretive and introverted personality?

I wonder what happens when Cyrus wants a drink of water. He calls to the servants. These water bearers must be retainers of exceptional trustworthiness, who have taken an inviolable oath; otherwise, what would prevent their taking sips of the priceless liquid on the sly? And so, at the command, they fetch a silver pitcher. Does Cyrus now drink alone, or does he say, “Care for some, Croesus?” Herodotus is silent on this subject, but it is an important moment to consider—one cannot live in the desert without water; deprived of it, a human being succumbs quickly to dehydration.

But perhaps the two kings do not ride together—in which case the problem does not arise. Or maybe Croesus has his own barrel of water, ordinary water, not necessarily from that special river, Choäspes. But all this is mere speculation, because Herodotus makes no further mention of Croesus until the expedition reaches the broad and calm Amu Darya.

Cyrus, who failed at possessing Tomyris, declared war on her. His first step was to order the construction of pontoon bridges on the
river, to give his army passage to the other side. While this work is in progress, a messenger arrives from the queen, who sends Cyrus commonsensical words full of wise caution:
“Abandon your zeal for this enterprise …. Stop and rule your own people, and put up with the sight of my ruling mine. But no: you are hardly going to take this advice, since peace is the last thing you desire. If you really are committed to a trial of strength with the Massagetae, you need not bother with all the hard work of bridging the river; we will pull back three days’ journey away from the river and then you can cross over into our land. Or if you would rather meet us in your own land, you withdraw the same distance.”

Upon hearing this, Cyrus convenes a meeting of elders and asks for their views. All of them, unanimously, advise a retreat, proposing that the engagement with Tomyris’s forces take place on their own, Persian side of the river. But there is one dissenting voice—that of Croesus. He begins philosophically: “
The first thing you should appreciate,”
he tells Cyrus, “is
that human affairs are on a wheel, and that as the wheel turns around it does not permit the same people always to prosper.”

In short, Croesus warns Cyrus point-blank that good fortune might desert him and that things could then go very badly indeed. He counsels crossing to the other side of the river and there—because he has heard that the Massagetae are unaccustomed to riches such as the Persians have and have experienced few pleasures—to slaughter herds of sheep, set out fine wine and tempting dishes, and organize a great feast for them. The Massagetae will eat and drink, fall into a drunken sleep, whereupon they can be taken prisoner. Cyrus accepts Croesus’s plan, Tomyris retreats from the river, and the Persian troops cross into the lands of the Massagetae.

Tensions soon arise, as is typical before a great confrontation. After Croesus’s earlier words sink in, those about fortune turning like a wheel, Cyrus, who is an experienced ruler, having now reigned over Persia for twenty-nine years, starts to grasp the
seriousness of what is about to transpire. He is no longer sure of himself, no longer, as before, arrogant and self-satisfied. He has a nightmare, and when daylight comes, concerned for the life of his son, Cambyses, sends him back to Persia accompanied by Croesus. In addition, plots and conspiracies against him proliferate.

But he is the commander of an army and must issue orders; everyone is waiting to hear what he will say, where he will lead them. And what Cyrus does is execute, point by point, Croesus’s advice, unaware that he is thereby proceeding step by step toward his own destruction. (Did Croesus consciously mislead Cyrus? Did he set a trap for him in order to avenge the defeat he endured and the humiliation he suffered? We do not know—about this Herodotus is silent.)

Cyrus sends in first the part of his army most unfit for battle—various camp hangers-on, vagabonds, the weak and the sick, all sorts of, as one used to say in the gulags,
dokhodiagi
(goners). He is in effect condemning these people to death, which is precisely what happens, because in the encounter with the elite of the Massagetae forces, they are cut down to a man. Now the Massagetae, having slaughtered the Persian rear guard,
noticed the feast, which had been laid out, and they reclined and ate it. When they had eaten and drunk their fill, they fell asleep—and then the Persians fell on them. Many of the Massagetae were killed, but even more were taken prisoner, including Queen Tomyris’ son, who was the commander of the army and whose name was Spargapises
.

At the news of her son’s and her army’s fate, Tomyris sends Cyrus a messenger with the following words:
“Give me back my son, and then you can leave this country without paying for the brutality with which you treated a third of the Massagetan army. But if you do not, I swear by the sun who is the lord of the Massagetae that for all your insatiability I will quench your thirst for blood.”

These are strong, sinister words, of which Cyrus nevertheless
takes not the slightest notice. He is intoxicated by his victory, pleased that he has led Tomyris up the garden path and succeeded in revenging himself upon one who rejected his advances. At this moment the queen is still unaware of the depth of her own misfortune, namely:
When Spargapises, the son of Queen Tomyris, recovered from the wine and saw the trouble he was in, he begged Cyrus to release him from his chains. Cyrus granted his request, but as soon as Spargapises was free and had regained control of his hands, he killed himself
. An orgy of death and blood begins.

Tomyris, seeing that Cyrus had not heeded her counsel, gathered her forces and engaged him in battle. Herodotus:
I consider this to be the fiercest battle between non-Greeks there has ever been
… Initially, both armies rain arrows down upon each other. When there are no arrows left, they fight with lances and daggers. And finally, they resort to barehanded wrestling. Although they are equally matched at the start, gradually the Massagetae gain the upper hand. Most of the Persian army perishes. Cyrus, too, is among the dead.

What ensues now is a scene from a Greek tragedy. The plain is strewn with the corpses of soldiers from both armies. Onto this battlefield steps Tomyris, carrying an empty wineskin. She walks from one slaughtered soldier to the next and collects blood from the still fresh wounds, enough to fill the wineskin. The queen must be drenched with human blood, she must be positively dripping with it. It is hot, so she surely wipes her face with her bloodied hands. Her face is smeared with blood. She looks around, searching for Cyrus’s corpse.
When she found it, she shoved his head into the wineskin, and in her rage addressed his body as follows: “Although I have come through the battle alive and victorious, you have destroyed me by capturing my son with a trick. But I warned you that I would quench your thirst for blood, and so I shall.”

That is how the battle ends.

That is how Cyrus dies.

The stage empties, and the only one left standing is the despairing, hate-filled Tomyris.

Herodotus offers no commentary, adding only, with a reporter’s sense of duty, several pieces of information about Massagetan customs, which were, after all, unfamiliar to the Greeks:
If a Massagetan desires a woman, he hangs his quiver outside her wagon and has sex with her, with no fear of reprisal. The only imposed limit on life there is as follows. When a person becomes very old, all his relatives come together and sacrificially kill him and some livestock along with him; then they stew the meat and eat it. They believe that there is no more fortunate way to die, whereas anyone who dies after an illness is buried in the ground rather than eaten, and they regard it as a calamity that he did not get to be sacrificed
.

I
put Herodotus away into the drawer of my office desk, leaving Tomyris on the corpse-strewn battlefield, in defeated victory, despairing but also triumphant—the indomitable and incandescent Antigone of the Asiatic steppes—and I start to leaf through the latest batch of telegrams sent by the correspondents for Reuters and Agence France-Presse in China, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam. They report that Vietnamese guerrillas near Bing Long have engaged in yet another skirmish with the troops of Ngo Dinh Diem (the result of the clash and the number of casualties—unknown). That Mao Tse-tung has proclaimed another campaign: Dead is the politics of One Hundred Flowers; now the task is the reeducation of the intelligentsia—whoever knows how to read and write (these skills have suddenly metamorphosed into liabilities) will be forcibly deported to the countryside, where, pulling a plow or digging irrigation canals, coming to know real proletarian peasant life, he or she will be rid of liberal, One Hundred Flower-like chimera. That the president of Indonesia, Sukarno, one of the ideologues of the new politics of Pancasila power, has ordered the Dutch to leave his country, their former colony. One can learn little from these brief dispatches; they lack context and what one might call local color. I can perhaps imagine most easily the professors of Peking University, see them
riding in a truck, hunched over from the chill, not even knowing where they’re headed because their eyeglasses are fogging over in the cold.

Yes, much is happening in Asia, and the lady who distributes the dispatches around the various offices keeps placing fresh piles of them on my desk. But with time I notice that another continent starts to draw my attention: Africa. As in Asia, there is turmoil in Africa: tempests and revolts, coups and riots. But because Africa lies closer to Europe (only a single body of water, the Mediterranean Sea, separates them) one hears the rumblings of this continent with more immediacy, as though they were coming from just next door.

Africa’s contribution to world history has been immense—nothing less than a transformation of a centuries-old global hierarchy. By furnishing the New World its labor force, it enabled it to amass enough wealth and power to surpass the Old World. Later, having given over many generations of its best, strongest, and most resilient people, the depopulated and exhausted continent fell easy prey to European colonizers. Now, however, it was awakening from its lethargy, gathering its strength for independence.

I began to incline toward Africa also because, from the very outset, Asia had greatly intimidated me. The civilizations of India, China, and the great steppes were for me colossi, and even to imagine drawing near to any one of them required a lifetime of study—one could scarcely hope to know them all well. Africa, on the other hand, struck me as more fragmentary, differentiated, miniaturized by its multiplicity, and thus more graspable, approachable.

For centuries people have been attracted by a certain aura of mystery surrounding this continent—a sense that there must be
something unique in Africa, something hidden, some glistening oxidizing point in the darkness which it is difficult or well nigh impossible to reach. And many had the ambition to test their mettle here, to discover and uncover its bewildering, confounding core.

Herodotus was so intrigued. He writes that people from Cyrene, who had visited the oracle of Ammon, told him of a conversation they’d had with the king of the Ammonians, Etearchus (the Ammonians lived in the oasis of Siwa, in the Libyan desert).
Etearchus told them about a visit he had once had from some Nasamones, a Libyan tribe who live around the Gulf of Syrtis and the land a little way east of the Syrtis. During the course of their visit, the Nasamones were asked whether they could add to what was known about the uninhabited desert parts of Libya. In response, they told how some high-spirited chiefs’ sons of their tribe, once they had reached adulthood, concocted a number of extraordinary schemes, including casting lots to choose five of their number to go and explore the Libyan desert, to find out if they could see more than had ever been seen before. Libyans—many tribes of them—have spread out along the whole of the Libyan coastline of the northern sea … Then there is the part of Libya which is inland from the sea and from the people who occupy the seaboard: this is the part of Libya which is infested by wild animals. Further inland from the part full of animals Libya is sandy desert, totally waterless, and completely uninhabited by anyone or anything. So when the young men left their friends, the story goes, they were well equipped with food and water; they first passed through the inhabited region and then reached the part which is infested by wild animals. Next they started to travel in a westerly direction through the desert. After they had crossed a great deal of sandy country, surrounded by nothing but desert, they at last, after many days, saw trees growing on a plain. They approached the trees and tried to pick the fruit that was growing on them, but as they were doing so they were set upon by small men of less than normal human stature, who captured them and took them away. The two groups—the Nasamones and their guides—could not understand each other’s language at all. They were taken through vast swamps and on the other side of these swamps they came to a town
where everyone was the same size as their guides and had black skin. The town was on a sizeable river, which was flowing from west to east, and in it they could see crocodiles
.